WORSHIP WHAT KEEPS YOU ALIVE — CHELSEA STICKLE

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Hurricane Florence is barreling toward us. To prepare we buy sandbags, candles and non-perishables. We hide out in the bathtub, the four of us—Mom, Dad, Gretchen and me—with the floral couch cushions over us like the grass over a grave. In our parents’ arms, Gretchen wants to hear ghost stories. Stories about the undying. Stories about what will happen to us. Dad tells a story about a man with a hook for a hand. Mom says everyone dies, even ghosts meet an end eventually, change is the only constant. But we’ve been in this tub for hours and nothing’s changing, Gretchen whines. Mom says we have to take the long view. So we yank threads from the floral cushions, cut them with our teeth and start braiding them together for survival bracelets. Gretchen’s is all shades of green in a staircase. She weaves mine in pink chevron. Our teeth fracture granola bars and send the crumbs down the drain. We drink the water in bottles around our legs until they’re empty and we have to turn on the faucet, wetting our feet whenever we need refills. Gretchen wants to sit underneath and fill herself up. Mom and Dad tell more ghost stories to distract from the hunger. When we run out of granola bars, Gretchen forages for mushrooms unfurling along the edge of the tub. Pops one into her mouth like she’s sneaking a cookie. She chews slowly like she’s savoring it. My stomach rumbles. Our hands dart into the unsafe space outside the cushions. There are always fresh mushrooms waiting. We lift up a corner and peek outside. The mushrooms had multiplied across the top of the tub, down the side and across the floor. Dad says all mushrooms are connected, that they communicate through an underground network. Kill one and another will rise in its place. Perhaps the closest thing to immortality in the natural world. Gretchen whispers undying like she’s found her answer. There are no ghosts, only fungi. She strokes the nearest one. In the corner we spy the original mushroom holding its umbrella high over the others. Immortal Mother Mushroom, we praise as we eat Her children, destined to die and rise again. Our mouths full. Our tongues tingling. Everything good comes from Mother Mushroom. When Sunday, or what we think is Sunday, comes along we use mushroom caps for the Eucharist. We adapt hymns. We brew stews. We’ve never been happier.

Chelsea Stickle is the author of the flash fiction chapbook Breaking Points (Black Lawrence Press, 2021). Her fiction appears in CRAFT, Chestnut Review, Gone Lawn, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Best Microfiction 2021 and others. She lives in Annapolis, MD with her black rabbit George and a forest of houseplants. Read more at chelseastickle.com and find her on Twitter @Chelsea_Stickle.

WINGS TO FLY — HUNTER LIGUORE

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The sun comes to melt the snow. As I walk in the wild, I discover a sparrow unable to fly. The neighborhood surrounding us is chock with sound—dogs barking; children playing; cars passing; a saw cutting trees in the distance. Life moves and evolves. Then there is the sparrow, poking the ground, imitating the other birds. It hops to the mourning doves for help, but is ignored. It hops to the juncos, but is avoided. It hops to the squirrel, is hit and sent away. The sparrow sits alone, turning round and round, like a child, curious, yet unsure, perhaps trying to figure out where help will come from… the afternoon sun changes direction. Flocks of birds come and go. Even the sparrow has moved on. How did it gain its wings to fly—or did the sparrow have the understanding all along?

Hunter Liguore’s motto is ‘respect for differences.’ An award-winning author, professor, and historian, she’s won numerous literary awards and published widely, including her loving-kindness children’s book, The Whole World Inside Nan’s Soup (YeeHoo Press). A gentle advocate for living in harmony with the natural world and with one another, when you support Hunter’s work, you're partaking in an equal exchange that supports compassion and peace in the world. (www.hunterliguore.org.)

LONESOME GEORGE — SIMON NAGEL

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He outlived several names to become the rarest creature in the world. In scientific terms, he was an endling, the last of his kind. The weight of his ancestry loaded his shell and sagged his skin into the consistency of damp leaves. His mission was to save his species, for which he was given a great deal of help. He was matched with two exotic females from the Wolf Volcano region of Isabela Island. In July of 2000, thirteen eggs were laid. By September they were lost. A second clutch of five eggs was laid a year later, but a tortoise pace and an inherent lack of ambition is no match for a backslide into nothing. His cause of death was labeled cardiac arrest, but no one had the wherewithal to believe a Pinta Island Tortoise could die from a broken heart. His remains look out over the Galapagos, preserved as Lonesome George waits for a mate that will not come.

Simon Nagel is a writer from California that now finds himself in the United Kingdom. He has built a house, worked in an immigration law firm, and dabbles in printmaking. He recently finished his debut novel Gates to Nowhere.

THEMED ISSUE: NOSTALGIA — SUBS OPEN JULY 1-15, 2022

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Yippee! We’re coming back for another THEMED issue in 2022: NOSTALGIA!

  • Submissions will be open July 1 - 15, 2022 (Note: There will be no June submission period.)

  • All pieces (500 words or less) must be nostalgia-themed in some way

  • Pieces will be published in September and October 2022

Again, we’re looking for pieces that celebrate nostalgia in all sorts of heartbreaking, beautiful ways. Fiction, creative nonfiction, something in between—we can’t wait to read your work. 🤍

SALTWATER DOG — VIVIAN ZHU

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A decade ago, after the local pamphlets published news of a city swallowed by the sea, Ma fled home by ferry and drifted toward this landlocked country of livestock. I was born at the butcher’s, in the year of the dog, not even a day after she reached the shore. This, she says, is proof of my obstinance, a brand of loyalty I never wanted to inherit.
           Ma works at a slaughterhouse, the first of fifty on our block. She doesn’t mind the smell of death; her fears are limited to dementia and drowning. As the doomsday televisor warbles to the tune of a sea shanty, Ma picks at the bubblegum guts that have become perpetual freeloaders beneath the crescent of her nails. Here, clean things are hard to come by—everything we own is stained red, the color of Ma’s old flag, the color of meat, the color of blood.
           As a child, Ma would nudge me toward the playground downtown, where gilded buildings gleaned the sky. It was there that I met Noah, the skinny son of a sailor who lived ten stories above sea level and had thumbs so thin you’d think they were a thief’s. Every time his hands brushed mine against the swings, my palms would flee to protect the few pennies I stored in my pocket. Every time, he would laugh, his voice rough as sandpaper, sea storm. “If I needed your money, I would’ve taken it already.”
           I’m in Noah’s apartment, three years later, when the ocean outdoes itself, drowns a city the sailors said would be safe for seven more years. When an alarm rings for our city to shut, I scramble home to find Ma with a butcher knife still in hand, cleaving through the staircase in an attempt to carve our way to higher ground. In the distance, an incinerator exhales plumes of poultry into the air as smog. “We won’t need to leave, right?” 
           Her gaze bleeds into something softer. She drops the blade into the sink and lets the water rinse its stains. “You’ll understand when you’re older. Sometimes, there’s nowhere else to go.”
           Some things I’m afraid of: dementia, drowning, the precision with which Ma pierces a cow’s pancreas and pulls it clean. Some things I’ve forgotten: what I wanted from Noah, how his hands sought mine around the twist of rusting chainmail, why the water swallows us without remorse. We sit against his stairwell, ears attuned to the sound of the sea. All the lands we’ve ever left or lost are leashed as riptides around my throat, their pull so strong the drowning almost feels like mercy.

Vivian Zhu is a teen writer from Adlai E. Stevenson High School. She cares deeply about environmental justice and sustainability. In her free time, she can be found sucking on lemons and procrastinating on calculus problem sets.

THEY WERE THE YEARS OF FAT WATER — MYNA CHANG

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the lush years of golden wheat fields and daybreak rain showers. Years with no wildfires, when no one’s well ran dry, when runoff graced the riverbeds and playa frogsong lulled your kids into the bright Milky Way night.

They were the years you thought maybe you could buy a new truck, one with air conditioning and electric windows, well, maybe a used truck, but still, newer than the rust bucket your grandpa left you.

They were the years you told your kids they could go to college, maybe downstate, one of the big schools with a football team you could cheer on Saturdays, and you told them they could study whatever they wanted, something with a future, business, maybe, or maybe they could go to that vo-tech school in the city, auto body work always pays good, doesn’t it?

They were the years you thought you might be able to retire, put your feet up, maybe you could die at home in your bed, just like in a storybook, the years you dared to think you might not die in the seat of a tractor like your dad.

They were the years of promises impossible to keep, the years you forgot about drought, even though you drove every day past the drifted blow-dirt that used to be Grandpa Ralph’s homestead, the years you focused your gaze on a dawn-pink sky that stretched horizon to horizon with nothing but daydreamed plenty in the budding spring air.

They were the years of remembrance, those fat water years, the years of maybe, because when the water was good, it was good.

Myna Chang grew up in the Oklahoma panhandle, surrounded by vivid reminders of the ecological disaster known as the Dust Bowl. These remembrances inform much of her writing. Her work has been selected for Flash Fiction America (Norton), Best Small Fictions, Fractured Lit, X-R-A-Y Lit Mag, and The Citron Review, among others. She has won the Lascaux Prize in Creative Nonfiction and the New Millennium Award in Flash Fiction. Read more at MynaChang.com or @MynaChang.

THE HERBARIUM — GABRIELLE GRIFFIS

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The curator knew a small storm would choke the seaside town. She collected every seed, flower, and root she could find, attempting to preserve what would soon be lost to the ocean. Some species could only be found at night, insects that fed on the leaves of trees in darkness to avoid aviary predation. It was as if certain creatures only existed at particular times: morning, afternoon, evening. The sun traveled across the sky. The curator spent more and more time under moonlight, her fingers stained with sap. Her eyes were tinted with the anatomies of other lifeforms. She breathed terpenes.
           Strange things happened in edge environments, between plains and mountains, land and water.  
           Her herbarium contained specimens of every known plant in the region: bluestem, honeysuckle, cinnamon fern. Volumes of dried moss sat in cabinets and drawers. Mist rolled over the moors the night the curator went missing. Her empty car illuminated the forest. A search party was formed. Flashlights scanned the water. Sun rose over juniper swamps.
           A heavy rain followed. Streets flooded. Buildings lost power for months. The smell of muck and wet earth hung in the air. Basements moldered. Anosmia ensued. Dresses scented with black spores hung on clothing lines.  
           After the storm, the school year was canceled. Boats beached on jetties. The surf was littered with horseshoe crabs and whales. The search party was abandoned. Vegetation overtook deserted lots. Dust gathered in the herbarium, year after year until one day a figure emerged from the forest. 
           Moss had grown into her hair. Her brown eyes turned green. She walked through the abandoned town, past saltworn fishing wharfs, empty gas stations, and rusted signs.  Ghosts of summer baseball games cast shadows in overgrown fields. 
           Crows gathered in the trees. Finches perched in the grass. She saw herself picking horse chestnuts with her mother before the blight. She saw the truck where she had her first kiss, a transfer van carrying her grandmother’s body.  She saw the past and future as mycelia wove through her gray matter. She saw herself, trying to save this place, to learn from this place, over and over again, until she reached the herbarium, and opened the doors.

Gabrielle Griffis is a multimedia artist, writer, and musician. She studied creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she has also worked for the Juniper Writing Institute. Her fiction has been published in Wigleaf, Split Lip Magazine, Matchbook, Monkeybicycle, XRAY Literary Magazine, Necessary Fiction, Gone Lawn, and elsewhere. She works as a librarian on Cape Cod. You can visit her website at gabriellegriffis.com.

BYCATCH — KIM STEUTERMANN ROGERS

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Next week, when the fisherman pulls the dead albatross off the hook, he will note her dull eyes and long slender wings hanging limp. He will jot down the number on the metal band circling the bird’s leg and report it, triggering a rescue mission for the bird’s surviving chick, waiting on a nest some 2,400 miles away.

But, today, she tilts her white-feathered head to the sleeping ball of down between her legs, gently preening with the tip of her four-inch-long serrated bill. Then, she steps off the nest and runs, heading into the wind, her six-and-a-half-foot wings outstretched, air tickling her flight feathers, welcoming her into its embrace. She heads north to nutritious cold water for fish and squid to feed her babe, riding the roller coaster of waves, up and over, up and over, recycling air into energy, clicking off latitudes at 45 miles per hour. She is called the grandest living flying machine on earth.   

Kim Steutermann Rogers spent a month in Alaska as a fellow at Storyknife Writers Retreat in 2016 and, again, in 2021. She was recognized for “Notable Travel Writing 2019” in Best American Travel Writing. Her science journalism has been published in National Geographic, Audubon, and Smithsonian; and her prose in Atticus Review, Bending Genres, Hawaii Pacific Review and elsewhere. She lives with her husband and dog in Hawaii. Read more of her work at kimsrogers.com and follow her on social media at @kimsrogers.